Conowingo Dam

Second in size only to the massive hydroelectric works at Niagara Falls, the Conowingo Dam across the Susquehanna River was celebrated as a miraculous feat of modern engineering when it opened in 1928. The dam was built with astonishing speed and efficiency and completed on budget and ahead of schedule, and its generators came on line at the very crescendo of the Roaring Twenties, when the race toward electrification was changing American life. The hydro dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams in the Pacific Northwest, and the great colossus of Hoover Dam were all constructed in the next two decades, but handsome, indomitable Conowingo Dam preceded them all and remains in effective operation to this very day.

Author-filmmaker John R. Paulson began his research on the Conowingo Dam while creating the Maryland Public Television documentary Conowingo Dam: Power on the Susquehanna in 2016. Here, he recounts in rich detail the story of how the dam was built, the pioneering men who built it, the politicians who clashed over it, the village that vanished because of it, and the “storm of the century” that threatened it and the unique place Conowingo Dam holds in the nation's history.